Fawcett's Claim That All Of The Representations Throughout IFG Have No Status In The Theory

Fawcett (2010: 138):

Can it really be the case, you may be asking, that all of the representations throughout IFG and all the representations in all of the derived works have no status in the theory? Perhaps, you might think, the cumulative effect of the conflation of several individual elements would be to provide a conflation of structures? The answer is that while this is theoretically possible, in practice it does not do so. This is because the supposed 'functions' of 'Rheme', 'Given', 'Residue' and others do not correspond to single 'functions' and they do not play any role in generative systemic functional grammar, for the reasons given in recent sections of this chapter. And nor, as I have suggested above, has anyone yet made any viable proposal as to how such a model could be made to work. Conflation is, by all current SF definitions, an operation that applies only to individual, coterminous elements.

Blogger Comments:

[1] As previously demonstrated, the notion of 'structure conflation' does not figure in SFL Theory. It arises only as Fawcett's misunderstanding of SFL Theory, particularly his confusion of formal constituency (the rank scale that his model omits) — with function structure (clause rank).

[2] This is misleading, since each of these is a functional element:

• Rheme is the clause element that realises textual meaning that is not Theme;
• Given is the information unit element that realises textual meaning that is not New; and
• Residue is the clause element that realises interpersonal meaning that is not Mood.

[3] To be clear, here Fawcett means that these elements are not coterminous with elements of other metafunctional structures. As previously explained, there is no theoretical requirement that they should be coterminous, since this assumption only arises from Fawcett's notion and interpretation of 'structure conflation'.

[4] This is true.